


raised on the edge of the devil’s backbone

by tsukara (AndThenTheresAnne)



Category: Leverage, Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Crossover, F/M, M/M, Multi, Timeline What Timeline, no editing we die like the heroes we are, the OT3 is canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-29 03:15:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15720858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndThenTheresAnne/pseuds/tsukara
Summary: Jesse grew up on fairy tales where the bad guys are good guys and all justice needs is a little leverage. He hasn't believed in fairy tales for a long time.They hadn’t meant to leave their children a war, the three of them, but that's the way the world crumbled.--Aka the Leverage/Overwatch crossover that no one actually asked for.





	raised on the edge of the devil’s backbone

**Author's Note:**

> Blame a re-watch of Leverage, McCree starring in my other current WIP, and a certain line about a huckleberry. I'm aware the timeline doesn't quite work out (as far as I can tell), but I'm not one to let a plot weasel go to waste.

The stories that his folks told him and his sisters, growing up, Jesse knew that they were nothing more than bedtime stories. Fairy tales to try and convince a couple of kids that the world was not always as bad as it had once been. Or rather, that it had, but that there had been heroes once. That someone had cared enough to do something. That before the world had fallen apart, there had been heroes, and champions, and people willing to do what was right.

His mother and fathers had thought the world of the three of them, their kids. They never told the kids which one of them was whose--it didn't matter, they were family. Sophia had gotten their mother’s blonde hair, curling out in a frizz. Maggie never freckled, saw systems with her startlingly blue eyes like a game she could beat. All three of them got their mother’s light fingers, their fathers’ quick minds, their own unique talents. All with that big heart lying under everything that would’ve buried it deep beneath the simple business of trying to survive in a world gone mad.

They hadn’t meant to leave their children a war. Jesse once remembered a whispered argument, or so it had sounded, between his folks, late at night when the kids were all in bed, supposedly. His mother, insisting they could have done more. Papa reassuring her in hushed tones, Dad gripping the back of the chair like it could give answers if he squeezed hard enough.

His mother’s final foray into blaming herself in some way was met with Dad thumping the palm of his hand onto the back of the chair. “Gonna check on the kids,” Dad muttered to the other two as he walked toward where Jesse had been hiding on the stairs.

Dad hadn’t been fooled for a second at Jesse’s curled-up form under the blankets, feigning sleep. He’d heard the thumping of little feet trying to not thump. Unlike his sisters he hadn’t quite learned that skill yet. Dad sat down on his bed, ruffling his hair with a fond hand. “Hey, kiddo. What’re you doing up at this hour?”

Jesse had given up the play-acting immediately, sitting up in bed, giving a shrug. “Dunno. Couldn’t sleep.”

“Were you eavesdropping?”

“Yeah.” He didn’t even think of denying it. “Mom says it’s how you learn things sometimes.”

Dad laughed, but it didn’t sound like the kind of laugh you gave when you were happy. “There is that.”

Jesse twisted up his mouth in a frown, not understanding most of what he’d heard. “What’d mom mean? When she, when she was talking about stopping the robots?”

His father’s calloused hand stroked through Jesse’s hair as he thought, soothing. “There are a lotta woulda, coulda, shouldas in this world. Your mom’s just thinking about one of those. That’s all.”

Jesse didn’t understand it, but couldn’t figure out how to get around that not-understanding in his head, so he let it go. Years later, when he was older, there were so many questions he regretted not asking, but back then he was a child, and if Dad said it was so, then it was so.

Jesse once remembered a time when he thought his parents had stolen the stars to hang in the sky, believed his mother when she said the moon was the greatest heist she just hadn’t pulled yet, thought his fathers could protect him and his sisters from the rest of the world.

That had been a long time ago.

He always knew his parents were criminals of some kind, but then, who wasn’t, in this new world? There were the criminals and the dead, eventually. Even if some of those crimes were small, petty things, things that a court, if things still worked the way they once had, wouldn’t even bother with. Neglect and little cruelties that leaked through into his sheltered world on occasion. He was the youngest, the baby, but he had a good eye. Jesse never missed much, growing up.

Jesse feels like his world should have been shattered in a single moment or maybe night of high drama, fleeing and blood and darkness. Something suitably dramatic, like something out of one of his parents’ stories. But instead their safety had seeped away, drips and drabs and long nights sleeping in the back of Papa’s van as his folks drove.

He remembers his folks arguing long and low with Sophia, that night she left. That she felt she could make a difference in this fight, and wasn’t that what they had always taught her? And Dad’s eyes seemed so far away and Mom seemed like she was gonna cry and Pops circled back to the arguments he’d pulled out forty minutes before. 

In the end, she had left with one of Dad’s friends, Mom whispering advice into her hair and Pops reassuring her that if she changed her mind, at any moment, they’d be there, all she had to do was say the word, and…

“You’re really going?”

Sophia crouched, ruffling his hair. Jesse swiped it back into place. “I got to, baby bro.” 

Jesse crossed his arms, half-self-consciously trying to mimic one of Dad’s poses. She just laughed, gathering him into a hug. “Don’t give me that look. I’ll keep in touch. And I’ll be back.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

Jesse learned later not to make promises he couldn’t keep. He never blamed her for that one, but it had still hurt. Never officially declared, of course. Things had been too chaotic, by then. But Pops had looked and looked, and every time Dad would come back without Sophia and it seemed like something in Mom went behind a locked door, after that. A door he didn’t know how to open, even with all his parents had taught him. 

Maggie hadn’t even been a victim of the war, not really. First responders went into dangerous and deadly situations all the time, Jesse knew that. That building could have collapsed on anyone. Jesse knew, but it didn’t make it any better.

Not for his folks, either. They clung to him tighter, but got more distant, Jesse the one thing they hadn’t lost yet, besides each other. They whispered in secrets to each other more often, Dad going hard-eyed and tight-lipped whenever Jesse was around. No more easily-forgiven eavesdropping in those days. The other problem was that the tighter they held onto Jesse, the more his budding teenage rebellion grew. He stopped trying to listen in, stopped trying to get behind those doors and walls all three of his parents had hidden themselves behind, and so he drifted away.

He remembers the last time he saw them, though maybe not exactly as it happened. He isn’t sure how much of a teenage asshole he was. A fair bit of one, he knows, from the way Pops had rolled his eyes, from Mom’s pained smile. He remembers Dad was serious, drilling Jesse on where the emergency cash was, how to get out, what to do, when, how, Jesse playing along in pre-teen irony. 

Dad caught the irony, of course. Did that thing where he looked like four different things tried to come out of his mouth at once, and finally gave up, grabbing Jesse in a crushing hug. “Dad!”

Despite protest, Dad hadn’t let him go for a good long moment. “Hold down the fort for us.” Abruptly he released Jesse, bracing him, then turned and grabbed up his duffel in one swift motion. 

Pops watched him go, then pulled Jesse into a hug too, far less over-bearing than Dad’s had been. “What your dad said.”

Jesse was a little unnerved now, the weirdness of the situation seeping through his ironic detachment. “Y-yeah, of course, Pops.”

Then it was mom’s turn for a brisk squeeze of a hug and she was leaving too. House to himself for a weekend, that’s what they had told him. He had believed them.

“We’ll be back,” Mom nodded firmly, then shut the door behind her.

At least she hadn’t promised, Jesse thought later. After.

Jesse was never sure what happened to them, still isn’t. Heard rumors, of course. He could have found out, he was sure, sifted through everything and found the truth hidden among the lies. But he chose to believe the stories he’d heard, the ones that sounded like a fairytale, full of justice and honor and a little bit of payback. He’d been worried, then scared, then everything his folks had taught him had kicked in. Before he knew it he was going down the only path open to him, the one to survival. 

Later on, after the blood on his hands and a second chance, Jesse still chose to believe in something. Maybe it wasn’t your traditional fairy story, but a man had to have something to cling to. And what Jesse knew was that maybe there was justice to be found in the world, and maybe there wasn’t but you couldn’t do a damn thing without leverage.


End file.
